Monthly Archives: October 2008

"NTIS undergoes a rigorous process to ensure that all the information we offer is authentic and credible. This integrity, along with the breadth and depth of our collection, is why NTIS is regarded as the nation’s preeminent source of government information."

NTIS is now offering RSS feeds to any of its 39 major subject categories. One may subscribe to receive the latest titles, weekly. For a listing of Scope Notes that defines the specific topical content for each, go to http://www.ntis.gov/pdf/scopenotes.pdf

Search solutions provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has launched an updated interface for the Defense Technical Information Center’s new DTIC Online research portal (http://multisearch.dtic.mil). DTIC is part of the US’ Department of Defense (DOD). The interface, known as MultiSearch, offers four defence search channels from a single drop-down menu, allowing users to access a collection of scientific and defence-related resources in one simultaneous search. The search employs the latest version of Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit Research Accelerator, which is seen to provide ‘smart’ clustering, encyclopedia sidebars from Wikipedia, and EurekAlert! science news.

DTIC supports the DOD and its community by centralising scientific, technical and related defence-information services, databases and systems. Its new DTIC Online significantly expands the breadth of information scanned and retrieved with its four search channels: DOD websites, DTIC Public Scientific and Technical Information, the DTIC Website, and Federal Scientific and Technical Information. MultiSearch also includes a federated search of other federated search websites, including Scitopia.org and WorldWideScience.org – both powered by the Explorit Research Accelerator. It therefore is projected to consolidate a number of advanced search engines within one search, delivering results users might never have uncovered.

The upgraded MultiSearch portal adds new features that seek to enrich the user experience and value of research. By taking advantage of Explorit’s ‘smart clustering,’ MultiSearch provides relevance-ranked clusters that allow users to see their results organised by topic. It also retrieves and displays entries from Wikipedia and EurekAlert! that complement the search experience. Explorit delivers not only relevant results, but pathways and context to guide users to more relevant search results.

Deep Web’s federated search technology is projected to enable fee-based or proprietary content to be searched publicly on the Internet, without giving it away. This content is not searchable by public search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

DTIC Online was created specifically for the defence community. MultiSearch can be accessed from the pull-down menu by selecting ‘Federal S&T’ or by going directly to (http://multisearch.dtic.mil).The search is free and much of the content is available at no cost. Some content – like that accessed through Scitopia – can be purchased on a pay-per-view basis or accessed by a subscription.

The Chronicle of Higher Education on Monday, October 13, 2008, has announced the formation of a giant library to serve as a back-up for Google Books, designated as the HathiTrust.

"The…HathiTrust, …consists of the members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the 11 universities in the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago, and the 10 campuses in the University of California system. The University of Virginia is joining the project, it will be announced today, and officials hope to bring in other colleges as well."

Already HathiTrust (a shared digital respository ), contains the full text of more than two million books scanned by Google. However, only about 16 percent of the books in HathiTrust—or about 327,000 volumes—are out of copyright so that their full text can be delivered to all readers.

“Open access journal PLoS Medicine has published a paper in its latest issue, according to which the current system of publishing medical and scientific research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. In their paper, a team of researchers – Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health; John Ioannidis of Tufts University School of Medicine, USA and University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece; and Omar Al-Ubaydli of George Mason University – apply principles from the field of economics to present evidence consistent with a distortion.

According to these researchers, there is an extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply and the increasingly limited venues for publication. The result is that only a small proportion of all research results are eventually chosen for publication, and these results are unrepresentative of scientists’ repeated samplings of the real world. The authors argue that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated. The paper is available online at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201.

PLoS Medicine is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organisation. The journal provides an open-access venue for publishing important original research and analysis relevant to human health.”

“The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced the release of content redesigns for six additional clients on AIP’s Scitation online publishing platform. Enhancements include the incorporation of Web 2.0 features, which allow bloggers to capture a preformatted citation that contains embedded code and plug it directly into their blog, without any re-keying. Users can use social bookmarking, which allow them to store and access bookmarks from any computer and to use tags to organize the bookmarks. A Research Toolkit is available where researchers can discover and connect with online workflow tools such as zotero and Google Notebook.”

In response to a question put to the Engineering Division of the Special Libraries Association, Mike White at Queen’s University in Ontario, writes:

"For teaching and research purposes, the public patent databases are excellent resources. The quality and currency of the data is as good as the commercial sites. The patent office databases are updated weekly and most of the independent databases (FreePatentsOnline, Patent Lens, etc.) are current or no more than a week behind. My favorite is the EPO’s esp@cenet system. It’s user friendly, has tremendous content (60 million patents from 72+ jurisdictions) and an excellent classification search tool. I understand that they will be rolling out major enhancements to it sometime this fall. You might be interested in a comparison of free patent databases I posted recently on my blog."